Gazetteer & Your Place
Your Place: Black Las Vegas
Las Vegas and Clark County hold about 330,000 Black residents — from the Historic Westside to the fastest-growing suburbs in Nevada. The census profile.
The Place in the Atlas
The Las Vegas Valley — Clark County — holds about 330,000 Black residents, roughly one in seven of its 2.3 million people, the large majority of Black Nevada. The community's geography runs from the Historic Westside, the district where Black Las Vegas was confined in the casino economy's segregated decades, to the master-planned suburbs where its growth now concentrates. This article profiles the population in the census data.
Black Las Vegas begins with the railroad and swells with the war industries and the casinos — and was required, in the city's segregated era, to live west of the tracks. The Westside (the Historic Westside of the modern maps) built a complete community under that constraint: Jackson Street's clubs and businesses formed the district the era called the Black Strip, where the performers who headlined the Strip's showrooms — and could not stay in its hotels — lived and played after hours. The Moulin Rouge, opened in 1955 as the city's first integrated casino-hotel on the Westside's edge, marks the era in the record. The district's modern data carry the constraint's long tail: the Westside's tracts record the Valley's most difficult Black indicators — income, health access, housing condition — against a metro whose Black medians run far stronger, and the city's recent reinvestment programs are tracked against those tracts.
Plates for This Place
The Las Vegas file in this atlas holds three metro plates — distribution, concentration, and movement — built on the figures this page carries: about 330,000 Black residents, 14.5% of the metro. Around them stand the state plates for the state Las Vegas anchors, whose Black alone share is 10%, and the national plates that frame both. Your Place is the front door to that file: begin with Las Vegas, and every plate named above is one shelf away.
A gazetteer is the oldest part of any atlas — the index of places, with the facts that fix Las Vegas in the whole. The facts that fix Las Vegas are its size within Black America, its share of its own ground, and its position in the national pattern of concentration: a metro whose Black community is large enough, and established enough, to appear in every national table the federal record publishes. Those are the coordinates. The plates give them depth.
The modern Black population is a Valley population. North Las Vegas, the independent city north of the core, is roughly a fifth Black — one of the largest Black suburban cities in the West — with deep homeowner districts from the 1970s onward. Henderson, the southeast giant, records a growing Black population in the high single digits. The unincorporated county townships — Spring Valley, Paradise, Sunrise Manor, Whitney — hold large communities across the Valley floor, and the northwest's new master plans (Providence, Skye Canyon, Centennial Hills) draw the newest arrivals. The distribution resembles Phoenix's in kind — suburban, dispersed, automobile-scaled — at a higher Black share and with a service-economy workforce underneath it.
In Las Vegas, employment in Black Las Vegas runs through the hospitality economy that employs the Valley generally — the resorts' culinary, housekeeping, security, and entertainment workforces, substantially unionized on the Culinary Workers' model, which the labor data record as among the strongest private-sector wage floors for service work in the nation — and through the public sector, health care, logistics (the Valley is a distribution node for the whole Southwest), and Nellis Air Force Base's military economy. The COVID shock registered in this metro's data more violently than in any other profile in this section — the tourism collapse produced the nation's highest metro unemployment at its trough — and the recovery series since is the Valley's standing economic exhibit.
The Your Place pages are written to be landed on, not just read through: a resident of the Las Vegas metro arriving here finds the community counted, placed, and connected to its state and national frames in a single page. Holding the structure still while the numbers move is the gazetteer's work — the only way an atlas stays honest across editions, for Las Vegas as for every entry.
Short by design, this entry's work is placement rather than narration; the plates behind the page carry Las Vegas's narration in full. Census Bureau, 2020 Census; American Community Survey; Population Estimates Program. The table's benchmark row for Las Vegas states its basis in its label — the comparison rests on the same measure on the same basis.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the Las Vegas metro, alone or in combination | 330,000 |
| Black share of the Las Vegas metro population | 14.5% |
| Black share of the state population, alone | 10% |
| Black share of the United States population, alone (population estimates) | 13.5% |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census; American Community Survey; Population Estimates Program. Method: Figures are drawn from the published federal sources named on this page, for the geography named; tile shading bands the published Black population share into the five legend classes. Counts are rounded as published by the source agency, and national benchmark rows are labeled with the basis they are published on.